Whether online or not, we can’t help but join some community or other and this points to a human need for communion. It’s no surprise then that a lot of my activity this week revolved around the issue of the virtual community and around my efforts to understand what exactly constitutes a virtual community and which ingredients do you need in order to make this recipe work. I am intrigued by the idea that the sense of a community might just be a collective hallucination shared by its members and I intend to explore this in my ethnographic study. Could it be that our notion of virtual communities is just the result of auto-suggestion, of our deep-seated need to associate and belong?

At the same time, I tried to fuel my –admittedly waning– interest for Twitter by following some of the Top-100 educators that use this service (well, “top” according to this list) and decided to catalogue all my Social Media / Digital Culture / Education 2.0 / Web Studies books in Library Thing. It struck me that although the notion of Digital Culture isn’t exactly new, it is still evolving. This idea that our object of study is in a creative, almost orgasmic state of flux is one of the things I love most about this course.

Our task for the next two weeks is rather paradoxical: we are supposed to conduct an ethnographic study of an online community. Problem is, it’s very hard to find two cyberculture theorists who agree on what an online community is; In “Community and Cyberculture” (a chapter off An Introduction to CyberCultures) David Bell gives an overview of the multitude of views available for consideration. Some theorists see online communities as an expression of our need to associate and belong (a need amplified by modern disembeding, detraditionalisation and globalization), an effort to reclaim a virtual gemeinschaft. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who claim that the notion of an online community is in essence a consensual collective fantasy or hallucination, conjured specifically for sheltering its members from the contamination of pluralism found in real life. And let’s not forget those who think that the term itself suffers from increased conceptual meaninglessness, as –whether we intend to or not– we cannot fail to belong to some form of online community or other.

In light of this apparent inability to agree on what a community actually is, I thought it might be useful to collect various characteristics of an online community as proposed by various theorists in Bell’s and Rheingold’s texts.

* Bell, D. (2001) “Community and cyberculture”, chapter 5 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge.
* Rheingold, H. (2000) Introduction to The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press.